(no subject)
Our senior design project is to build an offroad vehicle to compete against other schools vehicles in an offroad venue in Oregon. The major restriction is on the engine which has to be an unmodified 10 HP Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine. I'm the suspension leader for the team and mainly focused on the front suspension. Most of my major contribution to the mini baja project has been working with Solidworks.
This is a pretty user friendly 3d engineering design program that allows you to see the progress of your work in real time and in 3d. I grew up using AutoCAD and back when I was learning the program it was hard to visualize how all those 2d parts drawings would like in real life. Solidworks lets you do that on a level I haven't seen before. It also comes built in with a Finite Element Analysis program to find stress concentrations or see major deflection points. I've been tweaking in Solidworks for like.. 4 hrs a day for the past week now.. It almost feels like a job.
One interesting thing that I found out was that the program tends to prefer Nvidia hardware for whatever reason.. My HD4870 runs fine on it but it doesn't allow me to use a lot of the eye candy features. I think that's a load because my ATi card has way more power than a Quadro FX 500 that they use at school and which supports the full eye candy. Yeah, I know gaming cards are different than workstation cards, but the hardware isn't that much different.. Buffered RAM and some fancy coding and charge 3x the price for it. Anyway.. not going to spend $900 for the workstation card I really want so this will work out fine.
As for the overall project - let's just say we have to work pretty hard over the next month to get the ball rolling.. Seems like every major step we take forward is followed by 3 or 4 delays. We'll see how that pans out later though. The heat is on.
This is a pretty user friendly 3d engineering design program that allows you to see the progress of your work in real time and in 3d. I grew up using AutoCAD and back when I was learning the program it was hard to visualize how all those 2d parts drawings would like in real life. Solidworks lets you do that on a level I haven't seen before. It also comes built in with a Finite Element Analysis program to find stress concentrations or see major deflection points. I've been tweaking in Solidworks for like.. 4 hrs a day for the past week now.. It almost feels like a job.
One interesting thing that I found out was that the program tends to prefer Nvidia hardware for whatever reason.. My HD4870 runs fine on it but it doesn't allow me to use a lot of the eye candy features. I think that's a load because my ATi card has way more power than a Quadro FX 500 that they use at school and which supports the full eye candy. Yeah, I know gaming cards are different than workstation cards, but the hardware isn't that much different.. Buffered RAM and some fancy coding and charge 3x the price for it. Anyway.. not going to spend $900 for the workstation card I really want so this will work out fine.
As for the overall project - let's just say we have to work pretty hard over the next month to get the ball rolling.. Seems like every major step we take forward is followed by 3 or 4 delays. We'll see how that pans out later though. The heat is on.